The Chip Kidd Album

Categories: Staff Picks , Arts & Crafts

In college, my major was graphic design, but by my senior year I discovered (or should have realized all along) that librarianship was my true calling.  Even so, when I went to bookstores, I would naturally pick up books with interesting covers and check the back flaps to see who designed them.  One name kept appearing again and again: Chip Kidd.   

You’re already familiar with Chip Kidd if you’ve read some of my earlier blogs, because he designed the covers for An Anthropologist on Mars, Schulz and Peanuts, and my all-time favorite cover, The Secret History.  But Kidd has designed many more (mostly for publisher Alfred A. Knopf), and you can see a 400-page retrospective of his work in The Chip Kidd Album: Book One: Work, 1986-2006.   

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, David Sedaris’ Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are well-known Chip Kidd covers included here. 

Kidd also tells the stories behind his designs, shows original sketches, unused ideas, and rejected covers, and gives honest and humorous comments about his work.  The Chip Kidd Album is a fun read for book artists and book lovers alike. 

P.S. After writing my blog, I discovered that our Turning the Page contributor Jennifer already wrote about this book, and had the chance to meet Chip Kidd last summer at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.  I’m so jealous!  So be sure to read Jennifer's blog too…